Chapter XIV: Paris (1)

Smith left Geneva in December for Paris, where he arrived, according to Dugald Stewart, about Christmas 1765. The Rev. William Cole, who was in Paris in October of the same year, notes in his journal on the 26th of that month, that the Duke of Buccleugh arrived in Paris that day from Spa along with the Earl and Countess of Fife; but this must be a mistake, for Horace Walpole, who was also in Paris that autumn, writes on the 5th of December that the Duke was then expected to arrive in the following week, and as Walpole was staying in the hotel where the Duke and Smith stayed during their residence in that city--the Hotel du Parc Royal in the Faubourg de St. Germain--he probably wrote from authentic information about the engagement of their rooms. It may be taken, therefore, that they arrived in Paris about the middle of December, just in time to have a week or two with Hume before he finally left Paris for London with Rousseau on the 3rd of January 1766. Hume had been looking for Smith ever since midsummer. As far back as the 5th of September he wrote, "I have been looking for you every day these three months," but that expectation was probably founded on reports from Abbé Colbert, for Smith himself does not seem to have written Hume since the previous October, except the short note introducing Mr. Urquhart. At any rate in this letter of September 1765 Hume, as if in reply to Smith's account of his pupil's improvement in his letter of October 1764, says, "Your satisfaction in your pupil gives me equal satisfaction." It is no doubt possible that Smith may have written letters in the interval which have been lost, but he had clearly written none for the previous three months, and it is most probable, with his general aversion to writing, that he wrote none for the four or five months before that. Hume's own object in breaking the long silence is, in the first place, to inform him that, having lost his place at the Embassy through the translation of his chief to the Lord-Lieutenancy of Ireland, he should be obliged to return to England in October before Smith's arrival in Paris; and in the next, to consult him on a new perplexity that was distressing him, whether he should not come back to Paris and spend the remainder of his days there. In compensation for the loss of his place, he had obtained a pension of £900 a year, without office or duty of any kind--"opulence and liberty," as he calls it. But opulence and liberty brought their own cares, and he was rent with temptations to belong to different nations. "As a new vexation to temper my good fortune," he writes to Smith, "I am in much perplexity about fixing the place of my future abode for life. Paris is the most agreeable town in Europe, and suits me best, but it is a foreign country. London is the capital of my own country, but it never pleased me much. Letters are there held in no honour; Scotsmen are hated; superstition and ignorance gain ground daily. Edinburgh has many objections and many allurements. My present mind this forenoon, the 5th of September, is to return to France. I am much press'd also to accept of offers which would contribute to my agreeable living, but might encroach on my independence by making me enter into engagements with Princes and great lords and ladies. Pray give me your judgment."[159]

Events soon settled the question for him. He was appointed Under Secretary of State in London by Lord Hertford's brother, General Conway, and left Paris, as I have just said, early in January 1766. Rousseau had been in Paris since the 17th of December waiting to accompany Hume to England, and Smith must no doubt have met Rousseau occasionally with Hume during that last fortnight of 1765, though there is no actual evidence that he did. Before leaving, moreover, Hume would have time to introduce his friend to the famous men of Paris itself, and to initiate him into those literary and fashionable circles in which he had moved like a demigod for the preceding two years. The philosophe was then king in Paris, and Hume was king of the philosophes, and everything that was great in court or salon fell down and did him obeisance. "Here," he tells Robertson, "I feed on ambrosia, drink nothing but nectar, breathe incense only, and walk on flowers. Every one I meet, and especially every woman, would consider themselves as failing in the most indispensable duty if they did not favour me with a lengthy and ingenious discourse on my celebrity." Hume could, therefore, open to his friend every door in Paris that was worth entering, but Smith's own name was also sufficiently known and esteemed, at least among men of letters, in France to secure to him a cordial welcome for his own sake. _The Theory of Moral Sentiments_ had been translated, at the suggestion of Baron d'Holbach, by E. Dous, and the translation had appeared in 1764 under the title of _Métaphysique de l'Ame_. It was unfortunately a very bad translation, for which Grimm makes the curious apology that it was impossible to render the ideas of metaphysics in a foreign language as you could render the images of poetry, because every nation had its own abstract ideas.[160] But though the book got probably little impetus from this translation, it had been considerably read in the original by men of letters when it first came out, and many of them had then formed, as Abbé Morellet says he did, the highest idea of Smith's sagacity and depth, and were prepared to meet the author with much interest.

Smith went more into society in the few months he resided in Paris than at any other period of his life. He was a regular guest in almost all the famous literary salons of that time--Baron d'Holbach's, Helvetius', Madame de Geoffrin's, Comtesse de Boufflers', Mademoiselle l'Espinasse's, and probably Madame Necker's. Our information about his doings is of course meagre, but there is one week in July 1766 in which we happen to have his name mentioned frequently in the course of the correspondence between Hume and his Paris friends regarding the quarrel with Rousseau, and during that week Smith was on the 21st at Mademoiselle l'Espinasse's, on the 25th at Comtesse de Boufflers', and on the 27th at Baron d'Holbach's, where he had some conversation with Turgot. He was a constant visitor at Madame Riccoboni the novelist's. He attended the meetings of the new economist sect in the apartments of Dr. Quesnay, and though the economic dinners of the elder Mirabeau, the "Friend of Men," were not begun for a year after, he no doubt visited the Marquis, as we know he visited other members of the fraternity. He went to Compiègne when the Court removed to Compiègne, made frequent excursions to interesting places within reach, and is always seen with troops of friends about him. Many of these were Englishmen, for after their long exclusion from Paris during the Seven Years war, Englishmen had begun to pour into the city, and the Hotel du Parc Royal, where Smith lived, was generally full of English guests. Among others who were there, as I have just mentioned, was Horace Walpole, who remained on till Easter, and with whom Smith seems to have become well acquainted, for in writing Hume in July he asks to be specially remembered to Mr. Walpole.

So much has been written about the literary salons of Paris in last century that it is unnecessary to do more here than describe Smith's connection with them. The salon we happen to hear most of his frequenting is the salon of the Comtesse de Boufflers-Rouvel, but that is due to the simple circumstance that the hostess was an assiduous correspondent of David Hume. She was mistress to the Prince de Conti, but ties of that character, if permanent, derogated nothing from a lady's position in Paris at that period. Abbé Morellet, who was a constant guest at her house, even states that this connection of hers with a prince of the blood, though illicit, really enhanced rather than diminished her consideration in society, and her receptions were attended by all the rank, fashion, and learning of the city. The Comtesse was very fond of entertaining English guests, for she spoke our language well, and had been greatly pleased with the civilities she had received during her then recent visit to England in 1763. Smith was not long in Paris till he made her acquaintance, and received a very hearty welcome for the love of Hume. She began to read his book, moreover, and it became eventually such a favourite with her that she had thoughts of translating it.

Hume writes to her from Wootton on the 22nd of March 1766: "I am glad you have taken my friend Smith under your protection. You will find him a man of true merit, though perhaps his sedentary recluse life may have hurt his air and appearance as a man of the world." The Comtesse writes Hume on the 6th of May: "I think I told you that I have made the acquaintance of Mr. Smith, and that for the love of you I had given him a very hearty welcome. I am now reading his _Theory of Moral Sentiments_. I am not very far advanced with it yet, but I believe it will please me." And again on the 25th of July, in the same year, when Hume's quarrel with Rousseau was raging, she appends to a letter to Hume on that subject a few words about Smith, who had apparently called upon her just as she had finished it: "I entreated your friend Mr. Smith to call upon me. He has just this moment left me. I have read my letter to him. He, like myself, is apprehensive that you have been deceived in the warmth of so just a resentment. He begs of you to read over again the letter to Mr. Conway. It does not appear that he (Rousseau) refuses the pension, nor that he desires it to be made public."[161] The _Theory of Moral Sentiments_, which she had then begun to read, grew more and more in favour with her, and a few years after this--in 1770--when the two sons of Smith's friend, Sir Gilbert Elliot, visited her, they found her at her studies in her bedroom, and talking of translating the book, if she had time, because it contained such just ideas about sympathy. She added that the book had come into great vogue in France, and that Smith's doctrine of sympathy bade fair to supplant David Hume's immaterialism as the fashionable opinion, especially with the ladies.[162] The vogue would probably be aided by Smith's personal introduction into French literary circles, but evidence of its extent is found in the fact that although one French translation of the work had already appeared, three different persons were then preparing or contemplating another--the Abbé Blavet, who actually published his; the Due de la Rochefoucauld, who discontinued his labour when he found himself forestalled by the Abbé; and the Comtesse de Boufflers who perhaps did little more than entertain the design. The best translation was published some years after by another lady, the widow of Condorcet.

The Baron d'Holbach's weekly or bi-weekly dinners, at one of which it has been mentioned Smith had a conversation with Turgot, were, as L. Blanc has said, the regular states-general of philosophy. The usual guests were the philosophes and encyclopedists and men of letters--Diderot, Marmontel, Raynal, Galiani. The conversation ran largely towards metaphysics and theology, and, as Morellet, who was often there, states, the boldest theories were propounded, and things spoken which might well call down fire from heaven. It was there that Hume observed he had neither seen an atheist, nor did he believe one existed, and was informed by his host in reply, "You have been a little unfortunate; you are here at table with seventeen for the first time."

Morellet mentions that it was at the table of Helvetius, the philosopher, he himself first met Smith. Helvetius was a retired farmer-general of the taxes, who had grown rich without practising extortion, and instead of remaining a bachelor, as Smith says other farmers-general in France did, because no gentlewoman would marry them, and they were too proud to marry anybody else, he had married a pretty and clever wife, an early friend of Turgot's, who helped to make his Tuesday dinners among the most agreeable entertainments in Paris. He had recently returned from a long sojourn in England, so enchanted with both country and people that d'Holbach, who could find nothing to praise in either, declared he could really have seen nothing in England all the time except the persecution for heresy which he had shortly before suffered in France, and would have escaped in our freer air; and he was always very hospitable to English celebrities, so that it may be inferred that Smith enjoyed many opportunities of conversation with this versatile and philosophical financier during his stay in Paris.

Morellet, whose acquaintance Smith made at Helvetius' house, became one of his fastest friends in France, and on leaving Paris Smith gave him for a keepsake his own pocket-book,--a very pretty English-made pocket-book, says the Abbé, which "has served me these twenty years." Morellet, besides being an advanced economist, whose views ran in sympathy with Smith's own, was the most delightful of companions, uniting with strong sense and a deep love of the right an unfailing play of irony and fun, and ever ready, as Fanny Burney found him still at eighty-five, to sing his own songs for the entertainment of his friends. The Abbé was a metaphysician as well as an economist, but, according to his account of his conversations with Smith, they seem to have discussed mainly economic subjects--"the theory of commerce," he says, "banking, public credit, and various points in the great work which Smith was then meditating,"[163] _i.e._ the _Wealth of Nations_. This book had therefore by that time taken shape so far that the author made his Paris friends aware of his occupation upon it, and discussed with them definite points in the scheme of doctrine he was unfolding. Morellet formed a very just estimate of him. "I regard him still," he says, "as one of the men who have made the most complete observations and analyses on all questions he treated of," and he gave the best proof of his high opinion by writing a translation of the _Wealth of Nations_ himself. Smith would no doubt derive some assistance towards making his observations and analyses more complete from the different lights in which the matters under consideration would be naturally placed in the course of discussions with men like Morellet and his friends; but whatever others have thought, Morellet at least sets up no claim, either on his own behalf or on behalf of his very old and intimate college friend Turgot, or of any other of the French economists, of having influenced or supplied any of Smith's ideas. The Scotch inquirer had been long working on the same lines as his French colleagues, and Morellet seems to have thought him, when they first met, as he thought him still, when he wrote those memoirs, as being more complete in his observations and analyses than the others.

A frequent resort of Smith in Paris was the salon of Mademoiselle de l'Espinasse, which differed from the others by the greater variety of the guests and by the presence of ladies. The hostess--according to Hume, one of the most sensible women in Paris--had long been Madame du Deffand's principal assistant in the management of her famous salon, but having been dismissed in 1764 for entertaining Turgot and D'Alembert on her own account without permission, she set up a rival salon of her own on improved principles, with the zealous help of her two eminent friends; and to her unpretending apartments ambassadors, princesses, marshals of France, and financiers came, and met with men of letters like Grimm, Condillac, and Gibbon. D'Alembert indeed lived in the house, having come there to be nursed through an illness and remaining on afterwards, and as D'Alembert was one of Smith's chief friends in Paris, his house was naturally one of the latter's chief resorts. Here, moreover, he often met Turgot, as indeed he did everywhere he went, and of all the friends he met in France there was none in whose society he took more pleasure, or for whose mind and character he formed a profounder admiration, than that great thinker and statesman. If his conversation with Morellet ran mainly on political and economic subjects, it would most probably run even more largely on such subjects with Turgot, for they were both at the moment busy writing their most important works on those subjects. Turgot's _Formation and Distribution of Wealth_ was written in 1766, though it was only published three years later in the _Éphémérides du Citoyen_; and it cannot, I think, be doubted that the ideas and theories with which his mind was then boiling must have been the subject of discussion again and again in the course of his numerous conversations with Smith. So also if Smith brought out various points in the work he was undertaking for discussion with Morellet, he may reasonably be inferred to have done the same with Morellet's greater friend Turgot, and all this would have been greatly to their mutual advantage. No vestiges of their intercourse, however, remain, though some critics profess to see its results writ very large on the face of their writings.

Professor Thorold Rogers thinks the influences of Turgot's reasoning on Smith's mind to be easily perceptible to any reader of the _Formation and Distribution of Wealth_ and of the _Wealth of Nations_. Dupont de Nemours once went so far as to say that whatever was true in Smith was borrowed from Turgot, and whatever was not borrowed from Turgot was not true; but he afterwards retracted that absurdly-sweeping allegation, and confessed that he had made it before he was able to read English; while Leon Say thinks Turgot owed much of his philosophy to Smith, and Smith owed much of his economics to Turgot.[164] Questions of literary obligation are often difficult to settle. Two contemporary thinkers, dealing with the same subject under the same general influences and tendencies of the time, may think nearly alike even without any manner of personal intercommunication, and the idea of natural liberty of trade, in which the main resemblance between the writers in the present case is supposed to occur, was already in the ground, and sprouting up here and there before either of them wrote at all. Smith's position on that subject, moreover, is so much more solid, balanced, and moderate than Turgot's, that it is different in positive character; the extremer form of the doctrine taught by Turgot appears to have been taught also by Smith in earlier years and abandoned. At least the fragment published by Stewart of Smith's Society paper of 1755--eleven years before Turgot wrote his book or saw Smith--proclaims individualism of the extremer form, and intimates that he had taught the same views in Edinburgh in 1750. Smith had thus been teaching free trade many years before he met Turgot, and teaching it in Turgot's own form; he had converted many of the merchants of Glasgow to it and a future Prime Minister of England; he had probably, moreover, thought out the main truths of the work he was even then busy upon. He was therefore in a position to meet Turgot on equal terms, and give full value for anything he might take, and if obligations must needs be assessed and the balance adjusted, who shall say whether Smith owes most to the conversation of Turgot or Turgot owes most to the conversation of Smith? The state of the exchange cannot be determined from mere priority of publication; no other means of determining it exist, and it is of no great moment to determine it at all.

Turgot and Smith are said--on authority which cannot be altogether disregarded, Condorcet, the biographer of Turgot--to have continued their economic discussions by correspondence after Smith returned to this country; but though every search has been made for this correspondence, as Dugald Stewart informs us, no trace of anything of the kind was ever discovered on either side of the Channel, and Smith's friends never heard him allude to such a thing. "It is scarcely to be supposed," says Stewart, "that Mr. Smith would destroy the letters of such a correspondent as M. Turgot, and still less probable that such an intercourse was carried on between them without the knowledge of Mr. Smith's friends. From some inquiries that have been made at Paris by a gentleman of this society[165] since Smith's death, I have reason to believe that no evidence of the correspondence exists among the papers of M. Turgot, and that the whole story has taken its rise from a report suggested by the knowledge of their former intimacy."[166] Some of Hume's letters to Turgot--one from this year 1766, combating among other things Turgot's principle of the single tax on the net product of the land--still exist among the Turgot family archives, but none from Smith, for Leon Say examined those archives a few years ago with this purpose among others expressly in view.

An occasional letter, however, certainly did pass between them, for, as Smith himself mentions in a letter which will appear in a subsequent chapter, it was "by the particular favour of M. Turgot" that he received the copy of the _Mémoires concernant les Impositions_, which he quotes so often in the _Wealth of Nations_. This book was not printed when he was in France, and as it needed much influence to get a copy of it, his was most probably got after Turgot became Controller-General of the Finances in 1774. But in any case it would involve the exchange of letters.

Smith, with all his admiration for Turgot, thought him too simple-hearted for a practical statesman, too prone, as noble natures often are, to underrate the selfishness, stupidity, and prejudice that prevail in the world and resist the course of just and rational reform. He described Turgot to Samuel Rogers as an excellent person, very honest and well-meaning, but so unacquainted with the world and human nature that it was a maxim with him, as he had himself told David Hume, that whatever is right may be done.[167]

Smith would deny the name of statesman altogether to the politician who did not make it his aim to establish the right, or, in other words, had no public ideal; such a man is only "that crafty and insidious animal vulgarly termed a statesman." But he insists that the truly wise statesman in pressing his ideal must always practise considerable accommodation. If he cannot carry the right he will not disdain to ameliorate the wrong, but, "like Solon, when he cannot establish the best system of laws, he will endeavour to establish the best that the people can bear."[168] Turgot made too little account, he thought, of the resisting power of vested interests and confirmed habits. He was too optimist, and the peculiarity attaches to his theoretical as well as his practical work. Smith himself was prone rather to the contrary error of overrating the resisting power of interests and prejudices. If Turgot was too sanguine when he told the king that popular education would in ten years change the people past all recognition, Smith was too incredulous when he despaired of the ultimate realisation of slave emancipation and free trade; and under a biographical aspect, it is curious to find the man who has spent his life in the practical business of the world taking the more enthusiastic view we expect from the recluse, and the man who has spent his life in his library taking the more critical and measured view we expect from the man of the world.

Another statesman whom Smith knew well in Paris was Necker. His wife had very possibly begun by this time her rather austere salon, where free-thinking was strictly tabooed, and Morellet, her right-hand man in the entertainment of the guests, confesses the restraint was really irksome; and if she had, Morellet would probably have brought Smith there. But anyhow Sir James Mackintosh, who had means of hearing about Smith from competent sources, states explicitly that he was upon intimate terms with Necker during his residence in the French capital, that he formed only a poor opinion of that minister's abilities, and that he used to predict the fall of his political reputation the moment his head was put to any real proof, always saying of him with emphasis, "He is a mere man of detail."[169] Smith was not always lucky in his predictions, but here for once he was right.

While Smith was frequenting these various literary and philosophical salons they were all thrown into a state of unusual commotion by the famous quarrel between Rousseau and Hume. The world has long since ceased to take any interest in that quarrel, having assured itself that it all originated in the suspicions of Rousseau's insane fancy, but during the whole summer of 1766 it filled column after column of the English and continental newspapers, and it occupied much of the attention of Smith and the other friends of Hume in Paris. It will be remembered that when Rousseau was expelled from Switzerland, Hume, who was an extravagant admirer of his, offered to find him a home in England, and on the offer being accepted, brought him over to this country in January 1766. Hume first found quarters for him at Chiswick, but the capricious philosopher would not live at Chiswick because it was too near town. Hume then got him a gentleman's house in the Peak of Derby, but Rousseau would not enter it unless the owner agreed to take board. Hume induced the owner to gratify even this whim, and Rousseau departed and established himself comfortably at Wootton in the Peak of Derby. Hume next procured for him a pension of £100 a year from the king. Rousseau would not touch it unless it were kept secret; the king agreed to keep it secret. Rousseau then would not have it unless it were made public; the king again agreed to meet his whim. But the more Hume did for him the more Rousseau suspected the sincerity of his motives, and used first to assail him with the most ridiculous accusations, and then fall on his neck and implore forgiveness for ever doubting him. But at last, on the 23rd of June, in reply to Hume's note intimating the king's remission of the condition of secrecy, and the consequent removal of every obstacle to the acceptance of the pension, Rousseau gave way entirely to the evil spirit that haunted him, and wrote Hume the notorious letter, declaring that his horrible designs were at last found out.

Hume lost no time in going with his troubles to Smith, and asking him to lay the true state of the case before their Paris friends. To that letter Smith wrote the following reply:--

PARIS, _6th July 1766_.

MY DEAR FRIEND--I am thoroughly convinced that Rousseau is
as great a rascal as you and as every man here believe him
to be. Yet let me beg of you not to think of publishing
anything to the world upon the very great impertinence which
he has been guilty of. By refusing the pension which you had
the goodness to solicit for him with his own consent, he may
have thrown, by the baseness of his proceedings, a little
ridicule upon you in the eyes of the court and the ministry.
Stand this ridicule; expose his brutal letter, but without
giving it out of your own hand, so that it may never be
printed, and, if you can, laugh at yourself, and I will pawn
my life that before three weeks are at an end this little
affair which at present gives you so much uneasiness shall
be understood to do you as much honour as anything that has
ever happened to you. By endeavouring to unmask before the
public this hypocritical pedant, you run the risk of
disturbing the tranquillity of your whole life. By leaving
him alone he cannot give you a fortnight's uneasiness. To
write against him is, you may depend upon it, the very thing
he wishes you to do. He is in danger of falling into
obscurity in England, and he hopes to make himself
considerable by provoking an illustrious adversary. He will
have a great party--the Church, the Whigs, the Jacobites,
the whole wise English nation--who will love to mortify a
Scotchman, and to applaud a man who has refused a pension
from the king. It is not unlikely, too, that they may pay
him very well for having refused it, and that even he may
have had in view this compensation. Your whole friends here
wish you not to write,--the Baron, D'Alembert, Madame
Riccoboni, Mademoiselle Rianecourt, M. Turgot, etc. etc. M.
Turgot, a friend every way worthy of you, desired me to
recommend this advice to you in a particular manner as his
most earnest entreaty and opinion. He and I are both afraid
that you are surrounded with evil counsellors, and that the
advice of your English _literati_, who are themselves
accustomed to publishing all their little gossiping stories
in newspapers, may have too much influence upon you.
Remember me to Mr. Walpole, and believe me, etc.

P.S.--Make my apology to Millar for not having yet answered
his last very kind letter. I am preparing the answer to it,
which he will certainly receive by next post. Remember me to
Mrs. Millar. Do you ever see Mr. Townshend?[170]

The deep love of tranquillity this letter breathes, the dislike of publicity as a snare fatal to future quiet, the contempt for the petty vanity that makes men of letters run into print with their little personal affairs, as if they were of moment to anybody but themselves, are all very characteristic of Smith's philosophic temper of mind; and there is also--what appears on other occasions as well as this in the intercourse of the two philosophers--a certain note of affectionate anxiety on the part of the younger and graver philosopher towards the elder as towards a man of less weight of natural character and experience, and perhaps less of the wisdom of this world, than himself.

Smith seems to have shown Hume's letter to their common friends in Paris, and while deeply interested, as was only natural, in the quarrel, they with one consent took Hume's side, the only possible view of the transaction. The subject continued to furnish matter of conversation and conference among Hume's French literary friends during the whole time of Smith's residence in Paris. Hume sent Smith another letter a little later on in the month of July, which he asked him specially to show to D'Alembert. This Smith did on the 21 st, when he met D'Alembert at dinner at Mademoiselle de l'Espinasse's, in company with Turgot, Marmontel, Roux, Morellet, Saurin, and Duclos; and on the same evening D'Alembert wrote Hume that he had just had the honour of seeing Mr. Smith, who had shown him the letter he had received, and that they had talked much together about Hume and his affairs. Apparently Smith's objections to Hume publishing anything on the quarrel were now overcome; at all events, the result of this consultation of Hume's French friends was to advise publication; and accordingly a week or two later Hume sent on a complete narrative of his relations with Rousseau, together with the whole correspondence from first to last, to D'Alembert, with full permission to make any use of it he thought best, and he wrote Smith at the same time asking him to go and get a sight of it. "Pray tell me," he adds, "your judgment of my work, if it deserves the name. Tell D'Alembert I make him absolute master to retrench or alter what he thinks proper in order to suit it to the latitude of Paris."[171]

On the 27th of July Turgot writes Hume, mentioning that he had that day met Smith at Baron d'Holbach's, and they had discussed the Rousseau affair together. Smith had told him of the letter from Rousseau to General Conway, which he had been shown on the 25th by the Comtesse de Boufflers, and had repeated to him the same interpretation of that letter which he had already expressed to the Comtesse, viz. that Rousseau had not made the secrecy a ground for refusing the pension, but merely regretted that that condition made it impossible for him adequately to show his gratitude. Smith was thus inclined to give Rousseau the benefit of a better construction when a better construction was possible, but Hume writes Turgot on the 5th of August that Smith was quite wrong in that supposition.

One of those two letters of Smith's on the Rousseau affair mentions the name of Madame Riccoboni among those of Hume's friends with whom he had been in communication on the subject, and Madame Riccoboni about the same date writes Garrick that Smith and Changuion, the English ambassador's private secretary, were her two great confidants on the business of this famous quarrel. Madame Riccoboni had been a popular actress, but giving up the stage for letters, had become the most popular novelist in France. Her _Letters of Fanny Butler_ and her _History of Miss Jenny_ were dividing the attention of Paris with the novels of our own Richardson; and Smith, in the 1790 edition of his _Theory_, brackets her with Racine, Voltaire, and Richardson as instructors in "the refinements and delicacies of love and friendship." She was an effusive admirer of Smith, as, indeed, she was of Changuion, and of that _bel Anglais_ Richard Burke, and of Garrick himself;--"you are," she writes the player, "the dearling of my heart";--and when Smith was returning home from France, she gave him the following letter of introduction to Garrick:--

Je suis bien vaine, my dear Mr. Garrick, de pouvoir vous
donner ce que je perds avec un regret trés-vif, le plaisir
de voir Mr. Smith. Ce charming philosopher vous dira combien
il a d'esprit, car je le défie de parler sans en montrer. Je
sui vraiment fâchée que la politesse m'oblige à lui donner
ma lettre ouverte: cet usage établi retient mon coeur tout
prêt à lui rendre justice, mais sa modestie est aussi grande
que son mérite, et je craindrois que la plus simple vérité
ne parût à ses yeux une grosse flaterie; je puis vous dire
de lui, ce qu'il disoit un jour d'un autre--le métier de cet
homme-là est d'être aimable. J'ajouterai,--et de mériter
l'estime de tous ceux qui ont le bonheur de le connoitre.

Oh ces Ecossois! ces chiens d'Ecossois! ils viennent me
plaire et m'affliger. Je suis comme ces folles jeunes filles
qui écoutent un amant sans penser an regret, toujours voisin
du plaisir. Grondez-moi, battez-moi, tuez-moi! mais j'aime
Mr. Smith, je l'aime beaucoup. Je voudrois que le diable
emportât tous nos gens de lettres, tous nos philosophes, et
qu'il me rapportât Mr. Smith. Les hommes supérieurs se
cherchent. Rempli d'estime pour Mr. Garrick, désirant le
voir et l'entretenir, Mr. Smith a voulu être introduit par
moi. Il me flate infiniment par cette préférence, bien des
gens se mélent de présenter un ami à un autre ami, peu sont
comme moi dans le cas d'être sûre de la reconnoissance des
tous deux. Adieu, mon très-aimable et très-paresseux ami.
Embrassez pour moi vôtre gracieuse compagne. La mienne vous
assure l'un et l'autre de sa plus tendre amitié.

RICCOBONI.[172]

Not content with this letter of recommendation which she gave to Smith to deliver, Madame Riccoboni at the same time sent Garrick another through the post, and shows the sincerity of the feelings of high esteem she had expressed in the open letter by expressing them again quite as decisively in the closed one:--

_6 Octobre._

Aujourd'huy je vous écris uniquement pour vous prévenir sur
une visite que vous recevrez à Londres. Mr. Smith, un
Ecossois, homme d'un très grand mérite, aussi distingué par
son bon naturel, par la douceur de son caractère que par son
esprit et son sçavoir, me demande une lettre pour vous. Vous
verrez un philosophe moral et pratique; gay, riant, à cent
lieues de la pédanterie des nôtres. Il vous estime beaucoup
et désire vous connoître particulièrement. Donnez son nom à
votre porte, je vous en prie, vous perdriez beaucoup à ne
pas le voir, et je serois désolée de ne pas recevoir de lui
un détail du bon accueil que vous lui aurez fait.... Donnez
son nom à votre porte, je vous le répète. S'il ne vous voit
pas, je vous étrangle.[173]

Smith had apparently begged of her also a letter of introduction to R. Burke, and she wrote him one, but he went away without it; as she says to Garrick, in a letter of 3rd January 1767: "Ma bête de philosophe est partie sans songer à la prendre." Nor apparently had Smith as yet delivered her letter to Garrick, for she asks, "Vous ne l'avez pas encore vu Mr. Smith? c'est la plus distraite créature! mais c'est une des plus aimables. Je l'aime beaucoup et je l'estime encore d'avantage."[174] A few weeks later, on the 29th of January, she again returns to the subject of Smith, asking Garrick whether he had yet seen him, whether he was in London or had delivered her letter, and adding, "C'est un homme charmant, n'est-il pas?"[175]

Madame Riccoboni was not the only Frenchwoman who was touched with Smith's personal charms; we hear of another, a marquise, "a woman too of talents and wit," who actually fell in love with him. It was during an excursion Smith made from Paris to Abbeville, with the Duke of Buccleugh and several other English noblemen and a certain Captain Lloyd, a retired officer, who was afterwards a friend, perhaps a patient, of Dr. Currie, the author of the _Life of Burns_, and told the doctor this and many other anecdotes about the economist. Lloyd was, according to Currie, a most interesting and accomplished man, and his acquaintance with Smith was one of great intimacy. The party seem to have stayed some days at Abbeville--to visit Crecy, no doubt, like patriotic Englishmen, and this French marquise was stopping at the same hotel. She had just come from Paris, where she found all the world talking about Hume, and having heard that Smith was Hume's particular friend and almost as great a philosopher as he, she was bent on making so famous a conquest, but after many persistent efforts was obliged eventually to abandon the attempt. Her philosopher could not endure her, nor could he--and this greatly amused his own party--conceal his embarrassment; but it was not philosophy altogether that steeled his breast. The truth, according to Lloyd, was that the philosopher was deeply in love with another, an English lady, who was also stopping in Abbeville at the time. Of all Currie heard concerning Smith from Captain Lloyd this is the only thing he has chosen to record, and slight though it is, it contributes a touch of nature to that more personal aspect of Smith's life of which we have least knowledge. Stewart makes mention of an attachment which Smith was known to have cherished for several years in the early part of his life to a young lady of great beauty and accomplishment, whom Stewart had himself seen when she was past eighty, but "still retained evident traces of her former beauty," while "the powers of her understanding and the gaiety of her temper seemed to have suffered nothing from the hand of time." Nobody ever knew what prevented their union, or how far Smith's addresses were favourably received, but she never married any more than he. Stewart says that "after this disappointment he laid aside all thoughts of marriage"; but the Abbeville attachment seems to have been a different one from this and a later.

While in Paris Smith was a very steady playgoer. He was always a great admirer of the French dramatists, and now enjoyed very much seeing their plays actually represented on the stage, and discussing them afterwards, we may be sure, with an expert like Madame Riccoboni.

Speaking of his admiration for the great French dramatists, Dugald Stewart states that "this admiration (resulting originally from the general character of his taste, which delighted more to remark that pliancy of genius which accommodates itself to general rules than to wonder at the bolder flights of an undisciplined imagination) was increased to a great degree when he saw the beauties that had struck him in the closet heightened by the utmost perfection of theatrical exhibition."[176] The French theatre, indeed, gave him much material for reflection. In his later years his thoughts and his conversation often recurred to the philosophy of the imitative arts. He meant had he lived to have written a book on the subject; he has actually left us a single essay, one of the most finished pieces of work he ever did; and among his friends he was very fond in those days of speaking and theorising on that topic, and supporting his conclusions by illustrations from his wide reading and his observation of life. These illustrations seem to have been drawn frequently from his experiences of the French theatre.

The Earl of Buchan says that Smith had no ear for music, but there are few things he seems to have nevertheless enjoyed better than the opera, both serious and comic. He thought the "sprightly airs" of the comic opera, though a more "temperate joy" than "the scenes of the common comedy," were still a "most delicious" one.'[177] "They do not make us laugh so loud, but they make us smile more frequently." And he held the strongest opinion that music was always on virtue's side, for he says the only musical passions are the good ones, the bad and unsocial passions being, in his view, essentially unmelodious. But he thought scenery was much abused on the French operatic stage. "In the French operas not only thunder and lightning, storms and tempests, are commonly represented in the ridiculous manner above mentioned, but all the marvellous, all the supernatural of epic poetry, all the metamorphoses of mythology, all the wonders of witchcraft and magic, everything that is most unfit to be represented upon the stage, are every day exhibited with the most complete approbation and applause of that ingenious nation."[178]

Amid all this gaiety of salons and playhouses Smith found a graver retreat with the philanthropic sect of the economists in the apartments of the king's physician, Dr. Quesnay, in Paris and Versailles. Dupont de Nemours told J.B. Say that he had often met Smith at their little meetings, and that they looked on him as a judicious and simple man, and apparently nothing more, for, he adds, Smith had not at that time shown the stuff he was made of.[179] If they did not then recognise his paramount capacity as they afterwards did, there were some things about his opinions which Dupont thought they learnt better then than they could from the great work in which he subsequently expounded them. In a note to one of Turgot's works, of which he was editor, Dupont appeals from an opinion expressed, or understood to be expressed, by Smith in his published writings, to the opinion on the same subject which he used to hear from Smith's own lips in the unreserved intercourse of private life. "Smith at liberty," he says, "Smith in his own room or in that of a friend, as I have seen him when we were fellow-disciples of M. Quesnay, would not have said that."[180]

Though Smith met with them, and was indeed their very close scientific as well as personal associate, it is of course impossible, strictly speaking, to count him, as Dupont does, among the disciples of Quesnay. He was no more a disciple of Quesnay than Peter was a disciple of Paul, although, it is true, Paul wrote first. He neither agreed with all the creed of the French economists, nor did he acquire the articles he agreed with from the teaching of their master. He had been for sixteen years before he met them teaching the two principal truths which they set themselves to proclaim: (1) that the wealth of a country does not consist in its gold and silver, but in its stock of consumable commodities; and (2) that the true way of increasing it is not by conferring privileges or imposing restraints, but by assuring its producers a fair field and no favour. He had taught those truths in 1750, and Quesnay had not written anything bearing on them till 1756. Moreover, much in their system on which they laid most stress he has publicly repudiated. Still he speaks both of their system and of their master with a veneration which no disciple could easily surpass. He pronounces the system to be, "with all its imperfections, perhaps the nearest approximation to the truth that has yet been published upon the subject of political economy," and the author of the system to be "ingenious and profound," "a man of the greatest simplicity and modesty, who was honoured by his disciples with a reverence not inferior to that of any of the ancient philosophers for the founders of their respective systems."[181] He might not, like the Marquis de Mirabeau, call Quesnay a greater than Socrates, or the _Economic Table_ a discovery equal to the invention of printing or of money, but he thought him so clearly the head of the economic inquirers of the world that he meant to have dedicated the _Wealth of Nations_ to Quesnay had the venerable French economist been alive at the time of its publication. Smith was therefore a very sympathetic associate of this new sect, though not a strict adherent.

It may be well to explain in a word to the general reader that this sect were patriots and practical social and political reformers quite as much as theoretical economists. They believed the condition of the French people to have grown so bad as to be a grave danger to the State, and they preached their system as a revelation of the only way of salvation. They were too earnest for the Paris wits. Voltaire always sneered at them till he came to know Turgot. Grimm calls them "the pietists of philosophy," and Hume, bantering Morellet, wonders how a man like Turgot could herd with such cattle, "the most chimerical and the most arrogant that now exist since the annihilation of the Sorbonne." But they were grappling with living problems, and seeing into the real situation so much further than their contemporaries, that an historian like de Tocqueville thinks the best key to the Revolution is to be found in their writings. The malady of the age, they held, was the ever-increasing distress of the agricultural population. The great nobles, the financiers, the farmers-general, the monopolists, were very rich; but the agriculturists--the vast body of the people--were sinking into a hopeless impoverishment, for between tithes and heavy war taxes and farmer-generals' extortions, and the high rents which, to Turgot's despair, the smaller peasantry would persist in offering without reflecting in the least on the rise in their burdens,--between all these things, the net product of agriculture--what was left in the hands of the cultivator after all expenses were paid away--was getting less and less every year, and the ruin of the peasantry meant the ruin of the nation. "Poor peasants, poor kingdom," said they; "poor kingdom, poor king."

And the remedy was plain: the net product of agriculture must somehow be made to rise instead of fall. They supported their contention with a certain erroneous theory that agriculture is the sole source of wealth, but the error made little practical difference to the argument, for agriculture is always a sufficiently important source of wealth to make its improvement a national concern. How then was the net product to be increased? By better methods of cultivation, by removal of legal and official interferences, and by lightening the public burdens through the abolition of all existing taxes and of the existing system of collecting them through farmers-general, and the institution instead of a single tax on the net product of the soil, to be collected directly by responsible officials. According to the reminiscences of strangers who happened to fall into their company, the talk of the economists always ran much on the net product and the single tax, for they believed the two great needs of the country were agricultural improvement and financial reform. When Quesnay was offered a farmer-generalship of the taxes for his son, he said, "No; let the welfare of my children be bound up with the public prosperity," and made his son a farmer of the land instead.

In Quesnay's rooms in the palace of Versailles Smith would sometimes hear words that would sound very strange in the house of the king. Mercier de la Rivière, Quesnay's favourite disciple, while writing his book on the _Natural and Essential Order of Political Societies_, published in 1767, almost lived in Quesnay's apartments, discussing the work point by point with the master. The Marquis de Mirabeau mentions having seen him there six whole weeks running, "moulding and remoulding his work, and consequently denying father and mother" for the time. One day Madame du Hausset heard a memorable conversation there between these two economists. "This kingdom," observed Mirabeau, "is in a miserable state. There is neither energy in the nation nor money to serve in its place." "No," replied Mercier de la Rivière, counsellor of the Parliament of Paris and late Governor of Martinico, "it cannot be regenerated except by a conquest like that of China, or by a great internal convulsion; but woe to those who will be there then, for the French people does nothing by halves." The words made the little lady-in-waiting tremble, and she hurried out of the room; but M. de Marigny, brother of the king's mistress, who was also present, followed her, and bade her have no fear, for these were honest men, if a little chimerical, and they were even, he thought, on the right road, though they knew not when to stop and went past the goal.[182]

The doctor's room was a little sanctuary of free speech pitched by an odd chance in the heart of a despotic court, but his loyalty was known to be as sterling as his patriotism, and Louis himself would come round and listen to his economic parables, and call him the king's thinker?-as indeed he was, for he was no believer in states-general or states-particular, he had no interest in court or party intrigues, and his thought was always for the power of the king as well as for the welfare of the people. Marmontel, who used to come to him feigning an interest in the net product and the single tax, merely, as he confesses, to secure the doctor's word with Madame de Pompadour about an appointment he wanted, writes that "while storms gathered and dispersed again underneath Quesnay's _entre-sol_, he wrought at his axioms and his calculations in rural economy as calmly and with as much indifference to the movements of the court as if he were a hundred leagues away. Below they discussed peace and war, the choice of generals, the dismissal of ministers, while we up in the entre-sol reasoned about agriculture and calculated the net product, or sometimes dined gaily with Diderot, D'Alembert, Duclos, Helvetius, Turgot, Buffon; and Madame de Pompadour, not being able to get that company of philosophers to descend into her salon, used to come up there herself to see them at table, and have a talk with them."[183] None of the famous men mentioned here were members of the sect except Turgot.